Mountain Goats Gone Primitive: New Solo Tour Dates

January 21, 2009

For an awful long time, every John Darnielle tour was a solo tour. Excepting an early stretch with Rachel Ware, Darnielle’s Mountain Goats were a purely one man entity, if a bit a of joke on the whole singer-songwriter phenomenon. The arrangements on 2002’s Tallahasseefamously changed that–in order to realize the record’s relatively complex studio instrumentation live, unofficial second Mountain Goats member Peter Hughes became official, and a cavalcade of drummers and, sometimes, second guitarists stepped in. It occurs that this was seven years ago, meaning that plenty of latter day Mountain Goats fans have never seen Darnielle solo beyond the four-song mini-set that’s been part of the last few tours. This is probably what John means when he writes, “If you’ve never seen me do my thing solo acoustic blood-and-spit style, and if you wanna hear some new songs & some old ones, c’mon out during the early thaw, and JV & I will help you fling curses at what’s left of the snow,” by way of announcing a spring solo tour–the JV stands for John Vanderslice, who’ll be sharing the bill. I can personally testify that neither “blood” nor “spit” are intended here as figures of speech. The New York date, at the Society for Ethical Culture, is March 27. For the hell of it, the rest are below.